Andrea Dworkin: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily

distinguishable from it asleep.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel

—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,

and victimization. They are archetypal good women —

victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,

confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.

They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,

as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house

o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they

are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to

warrant either.

That one other figure of female good, the good

fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes

Onceuponatime: The Roles

43

or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally

moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have

one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her

wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,

she disappears.

These figures o f female good are the heroic models

available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would

seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance

to dream?

The Prince, the Real Brother

The man of flesh and bone; the man who

is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who

dies; the man who eats and drinks and

plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the

man who is seen and heard; the brother,

the real brother.

Miguel de Unamuno,

Tragic Sense of Life

He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,

he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He

travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.

O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to

become him. T hey suffer, and murder, and rape, and

plunder. T hey use airplanes now.

What matters is that he is both powerful and good,

that his power is by definition good. What matters is

that he matters, acts, succeeds.

One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.

44

Woman Haling

For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her

two sisters though he danced with her and presumably

conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does

not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from

the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even

physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern

counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates

the wrong village.

The truth o f it is that he is powerful and good when

contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.

The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of

the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the

shabby reality of the man as hero.

The Husband, the Real Father

The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,

again by definition, powerful and good. They are never

responsible or held accountable for the evil done by

their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice

it.

There is, of course, no rational basis for considering

them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved

progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale

Onceuponatime: The Roles

45

fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.

Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her

picking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.

T he father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a good

heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon

the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ” 18 When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found

their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell

on their father’s neck. T h e man had not had a quiet

hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,

after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do not

misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was

nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the

woman. He was a good man.

Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman

in the first place, has no emotional connection with his

child, does not interact in any meaningful way with

her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she

is dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is the

patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.

T he roles available to women and men are clearly

articulated in fairy tales. T h e characters o f each are

vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship

possible between them. We see that powerful women

are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that

men are always good, no matter what they do, or do

not do.

We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear

Woman Hating

family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,

murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,

female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystaliza-

tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that

culture.

C H A P T E R 2

Onceuponatime: The Moral

of the Story

Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,

Honor the sisters of your friends.

Pieces of ass, a piece of action,

Pieces.

The loneliest of mornings

Something moves about in the mirror.